Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday May 12, 2013 @07:15PM
from the paying-the-price dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A change from 'need' based financial aid to a 'merit' based system coupled with a 'high tuition, high aid,' model is making it harder for poor students to afford college. According to The Atlantic: 'Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.'"

Yep, got a nephew that is gonna end up having to drop out of college halfway through because he can't get the aid to finish even though he has high marks while the same school trips over themselves to court these third and fourth generation money kids that can just fuck off for four years for all they care, they'll have a diploma and a cushy job waiting at daddy's firm when they get out. He is gonna end up buried in 37k of debt without even a piece of paper, damned shame is what it is, poor kid worked his ass off and got screwed..

George Carlin said it best "Its called the American Dream...because you have to be asleep to believe in it"

I've known folks who paid their own way through school, who got their Bachelors' 8 years after they started, but they paid their own way along, CLEP'd out of the drudge-work classes, used the GI Bill, used employer-sponsored tuition reimbursements, got their undergrad at the local (read: cheaper) community college but their BS at the state uni, etc.

There's the traditional (and IMHO stupid) way of doing college, and then there's the smart way to do it. Do it traditional, and (sadly) prepare for the consequences.

It is no longer possible to work your way through most University programs if you work for minimum wage.

I get in-state tuition, and the total cost of my living expenses and tuition is more than 25,000 dollars a year. If you allocate 30 hours per week for studies and find a way to work 40 hours a week at $8.25 an hour, you would only earn $17,490.

That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% inte

That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% interest. Fuck that bank.

Anyone can get $57,500 in student loans from Stafford loans. Since it cannot be discharged, you can get it even if you declared bankruptcy yesterday. The subsidized portion is 3.4% interest and the unsubsidized portion is 6.8% (not 13%). In this case you only have to make $10k per year; $8k if you spend your first two years in community college. Even if you do have to take out the full amount, your after college income only has to be about $6k/yr more to account for your $300k monthly college loan payment.

and the total cost of my living expenses and tuition is more than 25,000 dollars a year

You can do better. Community college for two years for starters. And there are cheaper colleges than your in-state university.

And I'll just note that if college is too expensive for you now, then don't go. Work a few years and build up some savings. Sure, you might have done something (like have kids) which screws up your college plans, but so does dropping out of college with a lot of debt.

You were never able to work your way through school in the way you describe.

The way you work your way through school, and I did this at about minimum wage for the first part, is you go to an inexpensive school, typically a community college. You take your courses at the rate you can afford. Then you get your associates degree and use it to get a job that pays a bit more. If you are lucky you will get in at a company that has a tuition assistance program. You then go to a reasonably priced state school part

Sorry friend but you can't just do that anymore, you can't even keep gas in your car with a minimum wage job as they won't let you get full time hours anymore, he looked at the GI Bill but considering how they have refused to let soldiers leave when their enlistment is up? No thanks, not to mention his grandma is getting up there in years and her health is declining and if my mom passed on while he was overseas he would be devastated, and its pretty much just the one college here as the only other one in the state is a 120 mile round trip which again, gas prices.

So its all well and good you got lucky by being born at the right time but...that America? Really doesn't exist now, being 19 today is a hell of a lot different than being 19 then, nobody will give you full time hours, jobs are scarce, there just isn't any real paying jobs to be had. Hell I've had 3 guys, including one in his 50s bless his heart, trying to get the job mowing my mother's lawn, things are THAT bad now friend.

Still possible to work your way through school in NYS... source [suny.edu].

We may have some of the highest taxes in the country but things like this is what it goes towards. There's also the Tuition Assistance Program (additional financial aid) and things like the Education Opportunity Program for students of low income households.

It can be made even cheaper by living at home (subtract room and board cost). Hopefully home is near a city (not necessarily *the* city, there's SUNYs everywhere). If not, that's simply

No, they really don't. They really, really don't. I lived in San Francisco, which has a lot of public transportation. It took me 15 minutes to drive to work (from Bernal Heights to Potrero Hill) including parking. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to get to work on public transportation. The fastest route involved two buses and the subway. It would have been faster to walk. That's normally an option for me, in good weather, but it's not an option for elderly or infirm people. And right now, I'm infirm;

5. In this day and age, kids are competing with people from all over the World. A GPA less than 3.5/4.0 means you are going to have a hard time getting employed. Compared to back in my day, just graduating with a 3.0 meant you were golden.

I've never had a job ask me my GPA. Despite all the wording otherwise, aside from college admissions, my high school grades have never come up ever again. And, true to lower school experience, my grades in college never came up. The only time someone could have argued they mattered is when I went back for a masters, and even then, it was solely an issue of seeing if I completed my undergrad, not with what grades. My test scores have always been in the high 90-something percent, so maybe it matters more for the 50%ers, but for me, I know that nobody ever cared about my grades.

GPA does definitely matter, especially for continuing one's education. A very close friend of mine desires more than anything to become a practicing physical therapist. Unfortunately, her undergrad grades are quite poor. During her undergraduate work, she thought (like you espouse) that GPA was not important. Her GREs are middling, and due to her GPA, no medical school is giving her a chance. It is rejection letter after rejection letter. I actually admire her tenacity. Its been more than two years and she is still applying and searching for a way to achieve her goal.

I am in college now, and familiar with tuition costs. Right now, a Va resident can attend basically any college in Va for ~ 10k / year. Thats tuition, books MIGHT add another 1-2k, but you can generally rent books for $50/class x 4 classes x 2 semesters.

Yes, if you cant cover that, you dont have the gumption. Sorry.

And I love how the headline demonizes merit based aid. Oh the horrors.

Dude I've had guys in their 50s stop by my mom's house just trying to get the job mowing her lawn, you have NO idea how fucking BAD things are out there right now, I've known people that have abandoned their homes and are living on a relatives couch 4 states away just hoping its better there than it is here, and while you might find a school at the price you named it sure as hell isn't here, there is only the private college and if you can't go there its a 150 mile round trip to go to State U. and a shithol

You remember Germany of 35-45? Well i figure that will be the USA, and south and central america is gonna be Poland. You got a country that is armed to the teeth, is one of the most powerful militarily on the planet,and is looking at an economic collapse not unlike what happened in the early 30s...don't take Nostradamus to predict how this is gonna end, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

Yeah and sadly talking with these douchebags i get the feeling its EXACTLY that, they don't give a shit about ruining lives, its all about image and squeezing every dime they can out of a kid before spitting them out. If they can come up with the Benjamins to graduate? Fine, if not fuck 'em, they can just add another mark to show how "elite" they are and how only "the best" can graduate there, which sadly in reality translates to whether or not you are old money since i know guys that graduated that majored

But you wanted it, your entire ideology is based on destroying equality under law.

Your entire ideology requires to discriminate against some to provide subsidy to others, this is just a tide going the other way, you have pushed and pushed and you have gotten now what you inevitably pushed towards - inflation, lack of productivity, lack of personal responsibility and lack of individual initiative.

The government creates the moral hazard of fake loans that nobody in their sound mind would EVER give you out of their savings to go 'study' sociology, philosophy, literature. There was a story earlier in the day on this site about an employer not interested in these graduates, they are not worth the time, they have huge debts and they have proven themselves to be incapable of not following the crowd, they have proven to be lemmings.

Obama's new 'Pay as you Earn' idea is going to change the way people pay back loans, no more the loan payment will be tied to the actual loan amount, now it will be tied to your yearly earnings, so it will make sense to rack up the biggest debt you can and stay in college as long as you possibly can stretch, and then find a low enough paying job so that you won't be repaying too much. In 10 years the remainder of your loan is forgiven, and so colleges will raise tuition faster than ever before in history, I even fully expect to see doubling of tuition in a single year. Why not, you are not paying for it, you are not price sensitive.

It's a bail out, it's inflation. Elizabeth Warren wants to push interest rates for student loans to be the same as the rate the affiliate banks get at the Fed's discount window.

Good politics, I am sure 99% of you will agree and 99% of you want that to happen. Of-course it's terrible economics, the banks should not be getting that free money, that's inflation.

Of-course the banks are getting it from the Fed so that they can turn around and buy US Treasuries, to maintain the artificially low interest rates, to maintain the ability of the gov't to spend on your bankrupt social and military programs. The Fed also wants the banks not to fail for as long as they can stretch it, so the banks make the spread between the Fed's discount rate and the Treasury yield, a couple of percent, nothing fancy.

Except that it's over 2Trillion a year not counting the new 85Billion a month in just mortgages and refinancing. The Fed wants to reinflate the housing market, they are somewhat successful. The banks use these 'record profits' to inflate the bond and the stock market, stock market is record high.

Guess what, Warren's plan will make college tuition record high for the same reason that the stock and bond markets are high: inflation. Enormous inflation.

But her bill won't pass, however Obama's plan will and so don't worry, you'll be able to rack up all the debt you want and never have to repay it, just pay a little bit over 10 years. Of-course what are you going to pay it from? Who is going to hire these sociology and ethnic studies majors?

PhDs are going to wash floors in McDonalds.

Yes, it's the new feudalism, the politicians, your gov't, the bankers that are part of it are the feudals and you are the useful idiots.

Germany likewise is roaring along whilst providing worker protections, ensuring that everyone has health insurance, and, if I understand correctly, free university educations for a large segment of the population.

What you're describing is fascism, not progressivism. Ever since Reagan, the USA has been going balls-out towards fascism. Lots of people would say that we're already there. Us progressives want to create a society that cares about its people instead of just the very rich and where it's possible for everyone to achieve a decent standard of living regardless of where they start at on the socioeconomic ladder.

the hallmark of progressives progress. A focus on a better way of life for everyone. The second feature of progressivism is applying the scientific method to society and politics. Specifically observation and a willingness to change you're mind (See Tim Minchin's Storm [youtube.com] for a better (and funnier) explanation of science, and apply that to politics and society.

What progressives have observed, time and again, is that power collects at the top. No matter what. People pass the advantages they have to their offspring, who use those advantages to increase their share of wealth and power at everyone else's expense. The American housing bust is a great example. Millions lost their homes and the equity in them. That wealth wasn't destroyed. It's was claimed by banks owned by the 1%.

So if power is going to gather at the top we're left with two choices. Either a strong central government that can stand up to that power, or hoping against hope that the money and wealth 'trickle's down'. We've also seen that money and wealth don't do that.

I'm open to alternatives (I'm a progressive after all). But I've never once heard one that doesn't boil down to some form of socialism, or that isn't just wishful thinking.

So if you think these "progressives" have the answer I suggest you go get yourself put into some sort of institution.
There your life will be very well ordered. You will be told what and when to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to wear. You will be given limited access to bad things such as TV and books. And all of this dictated by "scientific" principal and "resource management"

I can understand your sentiment, but I have news for you. We are being managed by an elite already. They are the people sit on corporate boards and in executive suites and make decisions about what will be made, marketed and sold and how it will be done. They lobby congress and write "draft" legislation. They fund think tanks and foundations to shape policy and public opinion. They move in and out of government to make sure government and industry play nicely together.

Through PR and advertising you are already being told what to buy and eat, what to value and who to vote for. You are given a limited range of ideas to choose from in politics and can vote for Coke or Pepsi in every election. The major news media tell you about what goes on in the world, and you have no choice but to trust them even though you know that the message is being spun and massaged and they are leaving out the parts that are embarrassing to our government or against the narrative. I mean, do we really know who the rebels are in Syria and why we are supporting them?

The difference between this and what is envisioned in Zeitgeist (for the record, I find the idea of a resource based economy intriguing, but do not fully endorse it) is that in Zeitgeist they are open about what they are doing and why. And they advocate it for the betterment of everyone. You may not agree, and I don't agree with all of it either. But what we have now is a covert means of manipulating and influencing people's thoughts and opinions. It is being done for the benefit of a very few, not for everyone. And most people, by design, aren't aware that it is going on. We are already being managed. But instead of doing it by sustainable scientific principles, it's being done for power and profit.

I was surprised to discover recently that a friend of mine, a staunch Republican, had his Cadillac-plan health insurance cut by his defense-contractor employer and replaced with a bare-bones high-deductible plan.

Incidentally, I find it curious that we're in year 5 of Obama's administration (mind you, two of those years gave him full run of Congress), yet there are still progressives blaming presidents who are long gone.

His health plan was changed so that his defense-contractor MegaCorp employer, that feeds almost exclusively at the trough of the Socialist military, could make more money. There's absolutely no question that this fantastically huge and wealthy company couldn't have maintained funding for the current plan. They simply chose not to, because In These Tough Economic Times, they can get away with it.

The only companies that were actually affected, really, were the ones that had more than 50 full time employees and didn't offer health insurance. Everyone under 50 is exempt, everyone over 50 who already offered insurance didn't need to do a damn thing except for the whole contraceptive flap.

Or maybe his boss decided to cut expenses and pad his bonus while blaming Obamacare.

I see that all the time. Minimum wage goes up 10% and a company cuts jobs 50%, blaming minimum wage. Or the insurance was going up 20-30% per year from 1990 to 2010, and once Obama comes in, they change from one of the premium plan to a cheaper one, and blame Obama. I know my health insurance was cut the year before Obama, after having absorbed the cost previously, if they had lasted one more year, they could have blamed it all on Obama, and some more people would be ranting about evil Obama when he was unrelated to the issue, other than being a convenient scapegoat.

...and the massive financial cost upheavals induced by Obamacare had nothing to do with that happening, right?

No, it didn't. Private Corporation XYZ said let's make 2 billion a quarter PROFIT (and throw our employees under the bus) instead of 1.99 billion a quarter PROFIT (and cover their healthcare). Fuck them and you for being their brainless apologist.

And since then Congress and the Senate have been completely blocked by endless procedural blocks and filibustering. 5 years without being able to actually enact law is not 5 years. For those who don't live in America or flunked out of Civics we have multiple branches of government and the President in spite of popular belief cannot pa

"Ted Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the Senate, so when he died the then-governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, appointed a Republican to replace Kennedy and the Democrats lost their supermajority."

That's the complete opposite of what occurred. Governor Deval Patrick (a Democrat) appointed Paul Kirk (a Democrat) to fill Ted Kennedy's seat so they could get the required votes to pass the president's health care bill. He was eventually replaced by Scott Brown (a Republican) in the following special e

When I moved from theUS to Lithuania, ten years after they were released by the USSR, I learned a valuable lesson. In places where there is plenty of freh, clean air, people don't talk about the air. In places where there is freedom, people don't talk about freedom. They live it.

So a guy who votes Republican is being oppressed by a healthcare law passed by Democrats? I don't understand you're logic?

I'm not commenting the ACA as much as I'm commenting on why you're argument doesn't make sense. I also vote Republican, and my health care coverage has increased almost 5 times as much in the last 6 years, and my wife works for the insurance company. My companies insurance is so stupid, I actually feel like it would cost me less to just do without (barring any serious illnesses).

I actually feel like this is the best time for intelligent people to be alive. Between programmers being able to create apps and sell them on the various mobile phone marketplaces, between writers being able to avoid the publishers with ebooks and blogs, and with recording artists being able to bypass the RIAA with the various music marketplaces. Any intelligent person who can't make a living with a little hard work and ingenuity is really just a lazy person.

If you want the worst possible outcome then leverage yourself to the hilt with loans and get into a premium university only to be failed out in year three or four to maintain the university's aura of being challenging through the failout percentage. Now you've got no degree, no job, no way of paying back your student loans that amount to decades of your newfound gross income - and they can't even be forgiven in bankruptcy. You are well on your way to participating in the underground economy, living out yo

Governor Reagan did not end free education in California's universities. That was done after he was president, in 1982. He did allow increased student fees, and tried to end the tuition-free policy, but in no way "ended free education" since tuition was not instituted until 8 years after he left office.

You'd rather live in a society where there is no escape from poverty if you weren't talented^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hlucky enough to be born a millionaire? That's where we're headed if what TFA is about becomes commonplace. The idea is that everyone pays for it through taxes. This inherent selfishness of "I've got mine so fuck everybody else" is what is destroying my country and I'm sick of it! All the conservatives who bitch about taking care of other people have benefited far more from society than they can fathom and yet they can't see it. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization and part of civilization is making sure that everyone has a decent standard of living. Yes, you're paying for other people, but guess what? Other people are paying for you at the same time so it all works out. If you don't want to pay taxes you clearly don't want to live in a civilized country either.

Ah good, the self-righteous person who doesn't realize that there are plenty of people who work just as hard -- or harder -- than them and remain poor, and that the vast majority of the rich are people born into it. You got a break, good for you, stop acting like it's solely because you deserve it and other people don't.

For instance, if your parents make less than $65k/year (approx. 150% median U.S. household income, or 300% the cutoff for "poverty level") you can attend Harvard for free. Assuming you can get in. Which, in the grand scheme of things, sort of makes it a "merit based" scholarship after all.

Not exactly as easy as it sounds when the portion of your application involving your grades is a very small part of whether or not you get accepted. Most top colleges these days are obsessed with students that show profound personal initiative and social engagement, which are both activities that cost money. They do not currently "compensate" for the extra advantages a wealthy student has in the application process. Added to the emphasis on alumni connections (oh hi MIT) you might as well flush the application fee down the toilet.

They (elite schools) seem to be locating and successfully recruiting the lion's share of low-income high-ability students. At least if this article [npr.org] is to be believed:

Low-income high-achieving students at these schools have close to 100 percent odds of attending an Ivy League school or other highly selective college...

"These schools" are "from 15 large metropolitan areas. These areas often have highly regarded public high schools, such as in New York City or in the Washington, D.C., area." It's the 30% of low-income high-ability students outside those metro areas that aren't heading to elite universities. Harvard also claims [harvard.edu] that 20% of its class falls under the $65k/year threshold and therefore pays nothing.

The problem here is that most families with $65k have no idea how to turn their 90th percentile kid into the kind of kid who gets into Harvard. They don't know about "SAT Coaches," don't know which extracurricular activities to push, don't have friends who can donate massive amounts to the orphanage little darling just founded in Kenya, etc. If one parent makes $150k, the other makes $60k, and their friends all work at Hedge Funds, it's really easy to look great on a college application.

More importantly they generally don't know that Harvard will be free for their kid. They see the Harvard name, they see the price tag in USNews is astronomical, maybe they google the actual tuition charges of roughly $37k, and instead of pushing their kid to apply to Harvard and spend $0 they push him to apply to [cheap state school] and spend $10,000 or so a year.

There was recently on article on three Latina friends from a small city in Texas. The one who went to Emory had loans, but that was because as a teenager she didn't understand all the paperwork requirements needed to get aid. Her family had nobody who had ever gone to a school like Emory, so they couldn't help very well.

I'm not saying more wealthy families don't have advantages. They do. But Harvard is somehow managing to fill 20% of its class w/ kids whose families fall under the $65k/year threshold. So some of these families, at least, are doing "what it takes" to get into Harvard.

You have to be seriously deluded to believe the problem with American Universities is too many merit scholarships. I normally like the Atlantic but this is easily the dumbest thing I've read in print this year.

My high school graduation had 2 national merit scholarships awarded to "Home Economics"-grade Valedictorians. The remainder of the graduating class was divided in to two groups of people: the kids with poor or divorced parents that could manipulate their FAFSA to look shit poor, and everyone with an EFC higher than the families take home pay after groceries and gasoline.

The kids lucky enough to be born to crack head parents got free rides. The kids from the middle class got yoked with private student loans or didn't get to go to school at all. Grades had NOTHING to do with it.

-If you had a pulse and your mom was a pack of cigarettes from turning tricks: Harvard.-If you could program an FPGA to run the Attitude Control System on a pico-satellite, you may get a $1000 check if you wrote a 20 page essay on why GWB was the best president in history.

I delayed my Freshman year until I was 22 just so I could get my parents off my FAFSA only to have those pig fuckers raise the age to 24 on my 21st birthday.

Fuck FAFSA, fuck The Atlantic for publishing this drivel, and fuck Slashdot for legitimizing it.

Wealth and Power are compounding, always siphoning to the top. Unless you place restrictions, i.e. socialist policy, it's only a matter of time before serfdom ensues, It's no coincidence that 80% of the wealth created over the past two decades have gone to the top 1% of the population. Remember the dream of being millionaires in the 90s? Nowadays, billion is the dream. Yes, inflation over time is real, however it doesn't warrant an increase of 10^3 magnitude.

If your definition of violence is taxation, then I am perfectly happy living in a "violent" society.

Everyone is technically doing better, but the people on the bottom get a tiny slice of the growth while each person higher up is getting more at a faster rate. Everyone is climbing a ladder, but the ladder is getting taller faster than the people at the bottom are climbing--even though they are still making progress in absolute terms. It doesn't matter that they're "doing better" based on some metric because they are still relatively worse off than the people around them. This has real negative effects on the health of the individual and on society. It's a sickness, and it eventually kills the society that doesn't address it as it has before in history. Don't be surprised if your countrymen are unwilling to follow you into that hell just so they can remain morally pure as you define it. The smug satisfaction you'll get from having lived free of coercion won't count for much when you're living in a slum with the rest of the new serf class. You're not a member of the elite either, and the most charity you can hope for from them is the privilege of being eaten last.

Rising inequality is the real threat of today. You solve that by what you call violence, but what the rest of the world calls taxation. Wealth flows and accumulates at the top, that's the natural state of things, and unless measures are taken to push some back down you end up with disaster. You end up with disaster by trying to flatten the curve too much also, like some idealistic societies have tried, but we are far from that today. We've gone much too far in the other direction, not enough redistribution, not enough opportunity to prosper for the vast majority so that the top ten thousand families can horde more and more.

Eventually, things WILL change. People won't put up with it forever. We will have a more equal society either through a period of blood, or through a period of measured, deliberate, structural changes. I, for one, would rather not have humanity lose another hundred years of progress and prosperity while we sort out our economic system; because the mob isn't going to get it right the first time either.

The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.

The study doesn't actually say that, at least not according to the chart on page 4 [ed.gov]. It says that 18.8% of the students in college who had scores of 0-699 got merit aid. Not that 18.8% of all the students in college received aid with such low scores.

The article mentioned South Carolina as one of the states where public universities are affected. I have taught physics courses at a large SC school and at the end of the semester there is the usual rush of emails from your students telling you that they deserve a higher grade than they got, contrary to all the evidence of their lack of ability and effort. Well, maybe they should have thought about that earlier and actually cared about doing work for the class.

Among them there are also always some who say "If I don't get a B in this class, then I lose my scholarship" (sorry guys, grades are not given out according to personal need). Several such students every semester. And I wonder, how did these students ever get a scholarship in the first place given their highly mediocre academic ability?

Let's take Bill Gates as an example. He's been incredibly successful. Will his son follow in his footsteps? That's unlikely. But his children end up getting the best support, the best education and the best opportunities. Meanwhile, Manny at the local grocery store has a son Terry whom is as talented as Bill Gates. Terry doesn't get the opportunities of Bill's son so winds up becoming a street corner entrepeneur. By the time he's 20, Terry owns 3 crack houses, 4 brothels, is driving massive demand for international trade, has a workforce of 300 people and is a multi-millionaire.

Terry is just using his gifts in the best way he can, and because he's so damned smart.. he accomplishes amazing things and doesn't end up in jail. The end result is that society is less rich for not encouraging Terry's gifts. It's not that the rich are taking the education spots, it's that society doesn't recognise and encourage the gifts of individuals. Bill's son might be the greatest basket weaver in human history, he's just never going to weave a basket.

The education system forces people into boxes and tries to shoe-horn them into positions which fit with our current identification of what society represents. What society should represent should be driven by the individual drives of the people expanding it's boundaries, not by limiting the range of education to fit into a social model which has never not been broken. It's not about the money, it's more fundamental than that.

We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.

I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.

I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense.

Wow, that train of thought has completely blown me away. I am not even sure on where to start replying to you.

If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more. If you have someone leaving secondary school with a good understanding of basic subjects (math, English, at least one science and computers) as well as a rounded splash of some elective subjects such as history, economics, art, music, religion they are much more likely to either look for further education on their own (even if they have to pay as much for it as in the US) and move on to being a productive member of society rather than ending up in prison.

That's not to say that everyone with a good education will never do anything illegal or end up in jail, but the number of people in prison with a poor education should stand out above anything else that to keep people out of prison, give them an education. Give them the ability to actually join society as a peer rather than as the bottom of the ladder cleaning the bathrooms or working as a parking attendant.

This concept of paying more earlier also has the advantage saving more money in the long run. If you don't need to pay for putting someone in prison AND have the benefit of that person contributing to the society they live in, it clearly is a win-win scenario.

Education spending may have doubled, but spending on education didn't. The Anchorage school district is paying $250,000 a year on nurses for a single student because the disabled student happened to be born into a family of lawyers, while the amount spent in the classrooms isn't greatly changed. We've added regulations and cost, but not education. Unfunded mandates like NCLB require reduction of in-classroom spending to pay for compliance costs. The total cost of "education" goes up, but not on education-related expenses.

That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.

actually, your point is a pretty gross misstatement of what republicans are saying about the sequester. They are saying that slightly smarter budgeting by agencies could minimize the impact of the budget cuts on end users (in line with their stated goal of more efficient government). Whether or not you believe this will actually happen (though the FAA fix implies at least one counterexample), they do not blame the sequester on democrats, but rather claim the democrats are pushing for sell harming policies

There are many theoretical reasons to expect that education reduces crime. By raising earnings, education raises the opportunity cost of crime and the cost of time spent in prison. Education may also make individuals less impatient or more risk averse, further reducing the propensity to commit crimes. To empirically explore the importance of the relationship between schooling and criminal participation, this paper uses three data sources: individual-level data from the Census on incarceration, state-level data on arrests from the Uniform Crime Reports, and self-report data on crime and incarceration from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

All three of these data sources produce similar conclusions: schooling significantly reduces crim- inal activity. This finding is robust to different identification strategies and measures of criminal activity. The estimated effect of schooling on imprisonment is consistent with its estimated effect on both arrests and self-reported crime. Both OLS and IV estimates produce similar conclusions about the quantitative impact of schooling on incarceration and arrest. The estimated impacts on incarceration and self-reports are unchanged even when rich measures of individual ability and family background are controlled for using NLSY data. Finally, we draw similar conclusions us- ing aggregated state-level UCR data as we do using individual-level data on incarceration and self-reported crime in the Census or NLSY.

Given the consistency of our findings, we conclude that the estimated effects of education on crime cannot be easily explained away by unobserved characteristics of criminals, unobserved state policies that affect both crime and schooling, or educational differences in the conditional probability of arrest and imprisonment given crime. Evidence from other studies regarding the elasticity of crime with respect to wage rates suggests that a significant part of the measured effect of education on crime can be attributed to the increase in wages associated with schooling. We further argue that the impact of education on crime implies that there are benefits to education not taken into account by individuals themselves, so the social return to schooling is larger than the private return. The estimated social externalities from reduced crime are sizeable. A 1% increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large. Such externalities from education amount to $1,170-2,100 per additional high school graduate or 14-26% of the private return to schooling. It is diffcult to imagine a better reason to develop policies that prevent high school drop out.

And, unfortunately, that entire quoted section is either weasel words or confuses correlation and causation. Educated people commit fewer crimes: I'll buy that. It's the education that makes them so: Not so much.

Are they though? Or do they simply *test* as being two grades higher? The biggest complaint I've heard about the NCLB act is that it rather brutally encourages "teaching to the test", often to the detriment of imparting an actual education. When you get right down to it memorizing the proper process to solve a specific class of algebra problems (for example) will boost your test grade significantly, but be utterly useless in real life - the world very rarely packages problems in neat, clean, grade-appropriate form. Meanwhile the teacher that takes the time to teach general principles and strategies that are far more broadly applicable will have students that, for the most part, test more poorly because learning how to effectively use those underlying principles is a lot harder than memorizing useless routines.

Ravitch said elsewhere that the most significant factor in student achievement is parent income. Raise the parent income and you raise the student achievement.

The second sentence does not necessarily follow from the first. If the parent is some druggie or gangbanger piece of shit, then yes, their income (at least their reported income) is going to be shit too. And they're probably going to be an awful parent, with kids who perform poorly in school. But it does not follow (in this case, or many others) that giving said parent higher income is going to make them any better a parent. It's not like a higher income is going to get a meth-head or crack-head to quit dru

There are only so many jobs available that require higher education. When supply of educated workers is higher than the demand, a few bad things happen:

1) Lots of educated people simply cannot find work. The opportunities just aren't there. They wind up depressed, and working menial jobs that are below their skill sets and which do not pay them enough to make headway against their crushing student debt.

2) Salaries for the educated labor start coming down, since supply is so high. The people who manage to land the jobs must overwork themselves in order to hold them (since there is a line of people who would jump at the chance to replace them), and their low salaries means they can't pay off their student debts either (or if they do pay them off, it takes a very long time, which creates serious problems if they want to raise families).

3) Jobs that normally don't require an education start requiring one, since there are so many educated candidates (who cannot otherwise find work) applying. These jobs still don't pay enough for one to dig one's self out of debt, but now one must get an education and endure the mountain of crushing debt in order to get any job at all.

On the one hand, denying education opportunities to the poor is unfair. On the other hand, over-educating the population makes nearly everyone poor.

There is a hell of a lot more value in an educated populace than can be put in dollars, even if one accepts the zero-sum premise you are outlining here. For starters, an educated population is much more likely to be a functioning civic population; that is, one that keeps its government under scrutiny and actually fulfills its end of the social contract rather than allowing the mindless pulling of a lever every four years to serve as a substitute for real governed consent.

But why does damn near every 'good' job these days require a fucking college degree? Many use little more than what can be gotten readily with a year or two of voc-ed, if that. (1986 want ad in local paper for a dish washer at country club ended with "Send resume [sic]..." Inflation indeed.)

Further, ask yourself why have we effectively demonized such activity as parking cars or cleaning? It's useful work which in some manner makes life better for others. Should this not be a source of pride? And a liveable income as well? Why do we continually stratify tasks such that we have people upon whom we look down our noses? Doesn't this say something a bit nasty about the fragility and skew of our own perceptions about self-worth? Why is someone who brings food to a table or washes the dishes that come back somehow a lesser being? Is it required to have a de facto caste system? Or is that just the way it is because that's just the way it is? Seems to me what humans make they can generally un-make, or make differently.

Depends on what you define as a good job. I'm a network engineer for a very well known service provider. I make twice the average household income in America. I would consider it a good job.

I have an Associates Degree, but it wasn't even a consideration for the job, all they required was a high school education, along with the ability and temperament to do the job. I demonstrated those quite handily that I was offered the position in under 24 hours.

The longest I've been unemployed since I turned 16 (I'm well into my 30's) was 3 months, and every time I change jobs, my pay rate goes up.

I personally think alot of folks use lack of education as an excuse. There's no magic recipe to being successful. No checklist to getting a 'good' job. It takes some effort. Virtually every out of work or underemployed person I know is severely lacking in motivation and will to better themselves and has perfected the victim mentality. My evidence is, of course, anecdotal, but it's all I have to go on, and I calls 'em as I see's em.

Going to school to get a good job is not longer a reasonable expectation.

And it doesn't make sense. We are spending the money. If we could spend the same money to keep people out of prison, we would simply have a better life and culture here in the US. But as tone of your comment suggests, we will perpetuate this "every man for himself" mentality that got us where we are. Reality is far different from your notion of reality. Reality says that people give up on themselves long before the 12 years of public school are over. Their expectations of life have been defined for themselves already.

Prisons decrease earning potential even after getting out. That's another problem we are failing to face. Once a person has a prison record, they are black-balled for life. It's okay if prison were a deterrent to crime. For some people, it's a rite of passage.

Government doesn't "foot the bill." *WE* foot the bill. They just decide where the bills go. Once again, if the money that goes to prisons went to schools, even in part, it could make a huge difference in the long run. The problem is it wouldn't make a difference for several election cycles. And no way a republicrat will vote in money for schools instead of prisons when the opposing party would get the glory.

Once a person has gone to prison, they are no longer full citizens. They lose the right to vote and to bear arms.... legally. We have decided their career for them.

I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job.

No, that's fucked up.

The purpose of education is to provide society with more productive members.

(Your comment epitomises one of the very worst problems with America and Americans, and one of the reasons that this American doesn't live there any longer--not only is it always All About Me And My Money, but it's automatically assumed that the rest of the world thinks this way, too.)

To break up the wall of responses pointing out the moral and social quandaries of your post, here [bop.gov] is some material about how you can, in fact, work while in prison. The rehabilitation of prisoners is not completely a dead concept in the United States, although it is severely weaker than it is in many other Western democracies.

Actually it's possible to get a GED [passged.com] while in prison, which can then open up jobs that net up to almost ten times that ($1.15.) Also, it's non-compulsory, which is kinda a deal-breaker for the definition of slavery. The point is that it's still possible to learn and better yourself from behind bars, and even these marginal jobs help inmates build job skills that reduce the rate of recidivism (repeat offences.)

You left out c) there's a lot of shit laws on the books. And d) Prison is a big profit machine for a very few businesses. Go look up their connections for a real eye-opener. Also putting people in prison is great for the idiots running on law and order planks, never mind the real cost to the voters. Prisons are a basic suck to the economy. Stats are most crimes of violence are way down over the past forty years - and the correlation with prison population is weak at best. A low percentage of inmates are there for violent crimes. But don't believe me, go dig around a bit, all the info is there and fairly easily gotten.

I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.

The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.

Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.

Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.

Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it,

Of course the employers benefit, but so does the person attending, and society as a whole. Everyone should benefit. But it also depends on how you use the education you received. Some use it more wisely than others.
College isn't for everyone. It is a place to learn and discourse. It is not a place to learn how to do a job, although you can learn skills that will be useful down the road. Should your child go to college? That depends. There are a lot of things to do in life that don't require college, and l

US military fatalities are pretty low. The reality of military life is a lot different than left or right wing fantasies, and generally pretty boring to the average person 99% of the time. 1% of the time, it does get pretty exciting. This will sound dorky, but it has a lot of truth in it. If you're smart, motivated, etc you can learn a lot on or off the books. You get out of it what you want to, if you're willing to put in the work. Pretty much like college.

There's not much cannon fodder left in the US military. Even infantry is pretty geared up these days, and not interested in unnecessary fatalities. Too much so at times. Too many commanders are too risk adverse, and it is hindering getting things accomplished.

Education isn't going to live your life for you. You have to do actual work in order to improve your situation. If the work you provide to an employer is of such a high quality that it can generate "heavy profit", then there should have been plenty of room to negotiate an increase in salary, 401k or a health plan. Your situtation now has very little to do with your education; for the most part your education is only relevant for your first job interview.

My medical care plan is 200 dollars a month. Even if you're paying 4 times that, That puts your total income at 2400 a month. Which is ~14 dollars an hour. Which is less than my sister is making on her internship right now, and is quite a bit less than any of my engineer friends are making. College isn't the problem dude. It's you.

I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.

The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.

Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.

Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.

Then you must suck at your job, negotiating pay, and/or budgeting. After 20 years with a BSEE, I have two houses, 220 acres of land, nearly $1M in retirement accounts, family medical plan that is $240/month, one kid through college, another in it, and a third on the way there. No, I did not get a dime from my poor-as-shit parents.

I agree that college is not for everyone - someone has to flip burgers, be a Walmart greeter, mow lawns, and clean houses.

because it doesn't cost near what we pay to operate them. Stuff like this is what made me a socialist. The rich are going to find a way to use the government to their benefit and our detriment. I don't see any reason to pretend they'll not. So if we're going to have a powerful government that hands out socialism to the rich why not just get some of it for the rest of us? Start by making education in all forms free, and keep going from there.

I don't know. I think it is a losing proposition to look at what the rich get and try and hone in on that action. The reality is that the rich get what the rich get because they concentrate resources in the hands of a few people. If you try and give everyone what the rich are getting, you're going to fail simply because to get what they have, you have to exploit someone. And if you're giving everyone everything, you have no one to exploit. That's why you end up with either hybrid capitalist-socialist systems like in Europe, or command economies. And we all know how well command economies go.

You may be able to make things marginally better if you could somehow reallocate what the rich have, but since you're simply reallocating the riches of a relatively few people, it doesn't go as far as you think it might. If you outright confiscated, not taxed, but grabbed every asset of the so-called 1%, you'd get about 1 trillion dollars *total*. That's a lot of money, but the US government goes through 4x that much in one year.

The real solution is certainly trying to somehow temper the avarice of the rich as much as possible, but primarily to work on protecting and efficiently reallocating what you already have allocated to "everyone else".

The only problem I have with "socialism" is that it expects the central government to do something efficiently. At a national level, I'm not sure that's realistic if the country is big or complex enough. If it can be brought down to a local level, there may be more opportunity to keep things realistic owing to fewer administrative costs to get the money where it is needed.

I'm not against giving people things for free, but one does need to wonder how it is going to be paid for, and you're not going to get very far if you are relying on fleecing the rich for it.

If you want that awesome $29,000 a year job working 60 hours a week at the gringoDepot as a manager you need a full 4 year degree! To do anything aboe $17,000 a year you need a 4 year degree.

Perhaps someone in Silicon Valley or New York will rebuke my comment, but in the real world (Florida) that is what the jobs are and the lines for them are out the door and people are at the mercy of H.R.

Why can't there be a four year program from a high quality school that has the emphasis on teaching the skills you need for a career in industry?

Actually, Utah has something exactly like that. You spend the first two years hands-on in the trade at a campus of the Utah College of Applied Technology [ucat.edu] (there are 10 campuses spread across the state). Each campus is partnered with a state-level university, so if you want that 2-year degree to become a 4-year one, you take 3-4 "bridge" classes, then the 2nd two years of the 4-year degree.

The coolest part about the system? a top-grade high school student can go to UCAT as early as they can start 11th grade

In my experience, all the people who studied on their own and knew what they wanted to do and before they entered college became distracted and depressed. The filler classes just suck up time, motivation, and money. Then they'd just feel worse and worse for not focusing on their real studies

I went to an awful lot of school to learn computer science. My shiny fancy degree got me an interview for a job. But guess what? None of the questions in the interview were answerable based on what I learned in school. I knew the answers because I wrote code for fun as a hobby, starting at the age of 15. But I knew the answers and got the job. And guess what? I have not used anything from school in the job. My job is all about the useful programming skills that I had to pick up to write fun little toy programs as a hobby.

There was an accreditation change in the mid 1980's that forced colleges to stop teaching programming languages directly, so instead of teaching C, they teach things like "database programming using C", and you're expected to pick the language up on your own, rather than as part of the curriculum. And yes, after that time, colleges started turning out people who practically could not program.

These days they teach "game programming in flash" for all those people who don't realize that Flash doesn't actually

Your life is likely too short to matter. Don't need kids giving history lessons.

The California university system used to be free. When I went to college I paid $4 a semester hour, worked part time and graduated debt free without financial assistance. Never spent as much as $100 a semester on books and was always able to sell them back. Things have changed a great deal in a pretty short period of time.

You can bitch about that if you want... but my grand fathers would call you pansies.

I would call your grandfathers willing murderers.

They took the options life offered them and thrived.

On the suffering of others, more directly than most.

Why are you worth the system's time?

Ask yourself the same question. You are replaceable. In a system in which you constantly have to be keeping an eye on your value to society, we are all at risk. One medical problem and it's off to the glue factory you go.